


The Unknown Distance to the Great Beyond

by thegrumblingirl



Series: The Stars, the Moon, They Have All Been Blown Out [5]
Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: M/M, bad nights, definitely the beginning of the end, no more secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-04
Updated: 2012-08-04
Packaged: 2017-11-11 10:03:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/477343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrumblingirl/pseuds/thegrumblingirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's going to happen when Sam and Gene both feel that their time together might be coming to an end?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unknown Distance to the Great Beyond

Sam rolled over, but instead of the warm body he had expected, there was nothing. He must have gotten so used to not sleeping alone that he jerked awake. He blinked a few times to get his bearings, and then felt the mattress—it was cold. Slightly surprised that he hadn't felt his partner disentangle their limbs and get out of bed in the first place—granted, they'd had one hell of a day—he sat up to look around their tiny flat. No lights on, no sign of him.

"Gene?" he whispered into the darkness. "Gene?" he asked again, calling more loudly now. No answer. Sam got up, pulling on boxers and a t-shirt as he went, and walked around, checking the bath and the kitchen—empty. He checked the fridge and the tables for any messages or notes, but found none. He retraced his steps to the bed to see if Gene's clothes were still where he'd left them on the floor that evening—gone, too. His coat wasn't hanging over the chair by the window, either.

Sam fought to keep a handle on his thoughts—perhaps he'd had an idea about the case and gone to the station to check it out. He'd had to nag at Sam for about an hour that night to leave and go home for a good night's sleep before looking at the case with fresh eyes again the next morning; so that was probably his reason for not waking him when he left. Yes, that had to be it.

Or maybe he couldn't sleep, and took the Cortina for a drive. Or maybe he'd gotten hungry and gone up to his own flat to make something—it was November, a menacingly cold one, and because they spent most of the time at Sam's place, Gene's was only heated at a necessary minimum; which would explain why he took his coat, too. Sam tried to convince himself that all these things could be true so that he didn't have to consider that Gene might have… moved on without him. That somehow, a greater power that be snatched him out of the world he'd created, maybe even put someone else in his place to take charge. Gene had always told Sam that it would be him who would have to watch his lover go, because Gene was king of the jungle and could never leave, but what if he'd been wrong? What if something could tear down his world and leave him no choice but to abandon it if he didn't want to watch all of this—all of  _them_ —go to hell. Literally.

Sam shuddered.  _Don't think like that_ , he reminded himself, and sat on the bed to think. Should he go up to Gene's flat and look for him? Should he try to call him at the station? Could he go back to sleep not knowing where Gene was? The only thing he was sure of was that the answer to the third question was a huge, resounding, 'No.' A second later, he mentally slapped himself, and went over to the window to check the street below—the Cortina was gone, so he definitely wasn't in the flat upstairs. He sighed and hung his head. It was stupid and irrational to be agonizing over something like this—except in their situation, the bar for 'stupid and irrational' was raised pretty high. They were dead coppers in limbo, their relationship had been rocky lately, both at work and at home, and Sam had lost any kind of overview as to which had initially upset the other. It seemed to take turns.

The DI rubbed his eyes tiredly, and decided to wait it out. They'd been more at ease with each other that night, and he didn't want to ruin that by causing an unnecessary fight. They normally left notes when they popped out while the other was asleep or out of the flat, and Sam would just have to remind Gene of that—with a pointed reference to the fact that the DCI himself had urged Sam to make it a habit. Sam, after all, was the one who might disappear by cosmic decree, and while Gene had assured him they'd have a moment together, he still wanted them to be better safe than sorry. As police officers, they had each other's backs like that anyway when they were out and about, working cases.

So, he forced himself to lie back down, draw the covers up to his chin, and try to go back to sleep.

* * *

At the same time, Gene Hunt was leaning against the side of his beloved Ford Cortina, looking up at the night sky. He knew that this wasn't the real sky— _that_  lay beyond this, an infinitely vast universe full of stars and other planets. If he wanted to, he could make his eyes see past this sky, and into the cosmos, but he didn't trust himself to;  _not tonight_ , he thought. He knew that Sam's time was running out, he could feel it. He'd been feeling it for weeks now, and although he tried not to let on, he knew that Sam had noticed there was something wrong, which in turn had made him irritable. Well. More irritable than usual. It had escalated in a quarrel at work, about chains of evidence and procedures, and that had carried into their home, and… and now, Gene stood in the dark, not daring to look further than the edges of his kingdom.

He'd been so desperate to get out of the house that he'd forgotten to write a note in case Sam woke up to find him gone—he grimaced. Not only would there be hell to pay for that later, the point was: he was breaking his own rules, and he hated it when that happened. One might say that he was already busy breaking his own rules 24/7 anyway ever since he'd gotten involved with Sam, ever since he'd noticed his feelings for his insufferable know-it-all DI, but he tended to ignore that voice in his head. This wasn't about the principle.

This was about the fact that his time with Sam Tyler was coming to an end.

* * *

Sam had indeed managed to go back to sleep, but when he woke at 6am, still alone, it was harder to repress the bad premonition he had. He got out of bed and was just about to go to the bathroom when the doorknob clicked. His eyes glued to it, he stayed rooted to the spot, and waited. Quietly, and slowly, the door opened, and Sam could see Gene poking his head in, his eyes turned towards the bed. When he realized Sam wasn't in it, he frowned, and stepped into the room—coming to a halt when he spotted Sam right in front of him.

"Sorry," he muttered, and Sam's eyebrows shot up. "Didn't want to wake you." He shrugged off his coat and walked up to Sam to kiss him good morning. Sam leaned up into him, and they stood like that for a few moments, their lips sliding together lazily. When Sam drew back, all his worry and, he had to admit, anger had almost evaporated.

"Where've you been?" he asked anyway.

"Couldn't sleep anymore, took the Cortina for a spin. Watched the stars," he added the last part with a sarcastic snort, but Sam could tell there was more behind that than he would care to admit.

"What's going on, Gene?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I'm getting at. We've been in trouble lately, and now you're going off in the middle of the night to watch the stars? Hel _lo_ , I  _am_  a detective."

"Don't get smug with me at six in the morning, you."

"Gene."

"No cute deflections before dawn, I know."

"What's wrong?"

Gene broke away from him and wandered over to the window, only to turn around and step back close to Sam a moment later. He looked at him with that soul-piercing stare out of blue-green eyes that Sam would never forget, and drew a deep breath. "It's closing in on us, Sammy boy. It's going to happen soon."

Sam felt the floor underneath his feet shift, and suddenly everything made sense. Gene's irascibility, the continued awkwardness whenever they were alone together, and the increasing apprehension Sam felt whenever he thought about the future. They had agreed that they would figure this out together, but to face the music like this was… well. Expecting it to be easy would have been dumb. Their life together was bonkers, and they knew it.

"When?"

"I don't know. Could be a few months, could be another year. All I know is that we have to start making plans. And…," he broke off and lowered his eyes.

"And prepare ourselves," Sam finished for him. "Hey," he tried to get Gene's attention. When the older man looked up, Sam grasped his forearms to emphasize his point. "We have a choice about this. We can let ourselves be dragged down and be miserable while waiting for the inevitable. Or we can live the rest of my life here to the full—you know the stuff, live every day as if it were your last. It might not be long, so we'll have to try and enjoy it. It's going to suck, not knowing when, being condemned to wait, no matter how prepared we'll be, because, in fact, the preparation will be the problem. But we can do it."

"I do hate that you're this good at pep talks."

"Me, too. What did I do to deserve a promotion?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, remember how we talked about our issues, the things we had to work through, the unfinished business from when we were alive that landed us here? What did I do to unravel that? I thought it would be my dad, but I stayed after that, and then there was Frank Morgan, and I… came back after that, but that was because of you. I know the dynamics of this world only half as well as you do, but I do know that that's not the intended reason for staying here this long."

"How far into your psychological past have you managed to dig, Gladys?"

Sam thumped him in the shoulder for that, but considered his answer carefully. "I've uprooted as much as I could get a hold of, I don't know."

That wasn't quite true—he did have a theory. As the years progressed—at least they felt like years for them, but who knew how that really worked here—Sam had managed to reconcile their very, very different styles of investigation into a working symbiosis, and had accepted his gut instincts. That had been the thing that had brought him here in the first place: he'd become so absorbed in the sterility of his world in 2006, he'd forgotten about his intuition, and he'd nearly gotten his then-girlfriend Maya killed because of that. He'd refused to believe that instinct got them anywhere, and although he often had to act devil's advocate to counter Gene's go-for-broke and mentally hazardous ways of detecting, he knew better now. But he wouldn't ever admit that—unless maybe on the day he had to leave—to avoid encouraging Gene any further. When it came to his crime-fighting, he could be like a kid on a sugar rush—enable them, and they got worse. And more persistent when asking for candy.

"Whatever it is, you're getting good at it."

"Sorry."

"Don't you dare apologize! I have no right to keep you here, you shouldn't even have come back, and you know it. You deserve to get better, to move on. You should be glad."

"Glad?" Sam let his hands fall away from his lover, and stepped back, and indignant expression on his face. "How can you—"

"Sam! You know what I mean. I love you, but you know what I mean."

Sam's mouth opened and closed a few times, until he resigned himself to, a), the shock of Gene freely yelling 'I love you' into his face, and b), the fact that he did know. They didn't say it often, and usually only when they were either very stressed or very aroused, so to have it cited as a self-evident _thing_  to make a point when he was being stupid was… weird. Great, but weird.

Gene must have noticed the way his nose scrunched when Sam thought something over like this, and he chuckled. "I know. Just think before you talk so I don't have to say it too often."

"Thanks, dearie."

"You're welcome. Now, you understand where I'm coming from?"

"Yeah."

"You still don't like it?"

"Nope."

"That's my man."

"Look, I'm hungry, and you're in yesterday's clothes. Grab a shower and get changed, I'll pop out for breakfast, I can't be arsed to prepare something right now; besides, we're low on groceries. Then, we'll go to work and catch some scum, and tonight we'll let the others get heroically sloshed at the Railway Arms while we come back here and talk. I'll need that vindictive, dashing beat cop buried in that stupid field to help me through this."

"Nice plan. I'll get me toothbrush."

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing, I get nothing. Title: Snagged from The Killers' Goodnight, Travel Well.
> 
> Repost from ff.net.


End file.
